It does say Hardware...

[Hoax]

Looking for opinions on the following for a new rig:

Abit aa8 3rd eye:
http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/products.php?categories=1&model=202

CPU is still up in the air, will come down to how much I decide to spend I guess.  I realize that AMD is more bang for your buck, which is something that I usually support but unfortunately I will be going P4 for several reasons.  For one, I have basic knowledge but prefer not to bother with overclocking things myself as much as possible.  Secondly, I've built 3 computers in 8 years all are still running with the only problems being a burned out monitor, a dead video card and an Asus mobo that had some issues.  What this allows me to do is charge my family some cash (not much) whenever I upgrade as they get the machine I'm replacing.


memory:
http://www.corsairmemory.com/corsair/products/specs/twin2x1024-5400c4.pdf

Video Card:  ATI Radeon X700 256mb PCI express card
http://www.ati.com/products/radeonx700/index.html

Hard Drives:  Looking at getting two 36GB 10,000rpm sata drives in raid-0, with my current 7200rpm drive being storage this is not something I've been keeping myself up to speed with so I'll have to read up a little more on the percieved performance boosts.  If anybody has experience with this kind of setup I'd love to hear what you think.

[Stephen Zepp]

Hard Drives:  Looking at getting two 36GB 10,000rpm sata drives in raid-0, with my current 7200rpm drive being storage this is not something I've been keeping myself up to speed with so I'll have to read up a little more on the percieved performance boosts.  If anybody has experience with this kind of setup I'd love to hear what you think.

I made the choice to do this instead of go for 2 Gig mem (roughly same price), and quite honestly haven't been able to tell any difference. I do a lot of source code compilation on this machine, and while it's faster than my old one, I can't say "that's because of the hard drives".

Going back, I would have probably been better off with the 2 Gig, but I'm not limited by the drive speed either, so hard to say for sure.

[Hoax]

Yeah I have to say I was quite surprised to hear that HD's were being considered a major bottleneck, then I figured to just upgrade from 7200 to 10000 for my OS/Game install drive but some suggested this setup.  Obviously I need to take a more detailed look around the web on this subject.

My first inclination is to go with the additional memory as well, do you think the matched DDR2 is a good call in that department?  I can fit another pair on that mobo, but the memory upgrade would appear to be the more expensive option.  I say appear because I've found using pricewatch for hd's to be very sketchy in terms of the HUGE price fluctuations for seemingly similar products.  I need to find a western digital manufacture's number but their site was pissing me off last night.

[Stephen Zepp]

I'm in no way a "build the perfect beast" tech kind of guy, so other than saying I didn't see any obvious benefit as a human, I'm not going to try to pretend I can give any advice either way!

As a software developer however, the hard drive is absolutely one of the last remaining large bottlenecks for data utilization left in the PC (AFAIK motherboard busses are doing much better, but are still a slow point as well, but I could be wrong about this one). This was the main reason I elected to go the HD upgrade instead of additional memory as well--I figured anything to improve moving data on and off the hard drive would in the long run be much better than adding "just" another gig of memory, given the games I play.

[Trippy]

Looking for opinions on the following for a new rig:

Abit aa8 3rd eye:
http://www.abit-usa.com/products/mb/products.php?categories=1&model=202

Do you need a new computer, like, right now? That chipset doesn't support the new dual core Intel CPUs so you are potentially gimping yourself in terms of future CPU upgrades.

CPU is still up in the air, will come down to how much I decide to spend I guess.  I realize that AMD is more bang for your buck, which is something that I usually support but unfortunately I will be going P4 for several reasons.

For gamers, the Athlon 64 not only gives you better bang for the buck it also gives you better bang, period. In other words, it's the best gaming CPU by far.

memory:
http://www.corsairmemory.com/corsair/products/specs/twin2x1024-5400c4.pdf

Since you said you aren't an overclocker you might want to go with the lower latency but lower max bandwidth memory a la:

http://www.corsairmemory.com/corsair/products/specs/TWIN2X1024-4300C3.pdf

Video Card:  ATI Radeon X700 256mb PCI express card
http://www.ati.com/products/radeonx700/index.html

Assuming that's an X700 Pro, the 6600GT offers better performance for roughly the same price:

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2297&p=2

Hard Drives:  Looking at getting two 36GB 10,000rpm sata drives in raid-0, with my current 7200rpm drive being storage this is not something I've been keeping myself up to speed with so I'll have to read up a little more on the percieved performance boosts.  If anybody has experience with this kind of setup I'd love to hear what you think.

We had a discussion about RAID 0 here:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=1791.0

[Trippy]

My first inclination is to go with the additional memory as well, do you think the matched DDR2 is a good call in that department?  I can fit another pair on that mobo, but the memory upgrade would appear to be the more expensive option.  I say appear because I've found using pricewatch for hd's to be very sketchy in terms of the HUGE price fluctuations for seemingly similar products.  I need to find a western digital manufacture's number but their site was pissing me off last night.

Faster hard drives will have a minimal impact on your game playing experience (see the link in my previous post for RAID 0 gaming benchmarks). On the other hand, swapping to your hard drive because you've run out of physical RAM while gaming really screws up your frame rate/performance, and some games these days will eat up close to 1 GB all by themselves so even 1 GB total RAM doesn't cut it these days for game playing.

[Hoax]

Thanks for the posts Trippy.

Its odd, my first inclination was to go with the GF6600GT but a quick search of benchmarks and some quizzing of fellow gamers on some other boards prompted me to switch to the X700.  Looks like more research is in order on that one.

I do need to do the new computer thing now, its the right time for it...

I'm just reluctant to go with Athlon fear of the unknown and all that, short of ATI everything is a brand I've used in all my other systems.

*sigh*  well back to the drawing board going to have to look into everything a bunch more, will post after I've done a ton of reading (there goes my time for On the Road and Samurai Champloo)   

[Trippy]

Its odd, my first inclination was to go with the GF6600GT but a quick search of benchmarks and some quizzing of fellow gamers on some other boards prompted me to switch to the X700.  Looks like more research is in order on that one.

Are you sure they weren't talking about the X800 XL? At the ~$200 price point the 6600GT offers the best performance, but at the ~$300 price point the X800 XL is the fastest.

I'm just reluctant to go with Athlon fear of the unknown and all that, short of ATI everything is a brand I've used in all my other systems.

I actually think you'll have more issues going from NVIDIA -> ATI than Intel -> AMD. The ATI drivers, while much much better than they were in the pre-Radeon 9700 days still aren't quite at NVIDIA's level. The ATI OpenGL drivers in particular still need a lot of work. The nice thing about ATI compared to NVIDIA, though, is that they release new drivers every month so when problems do come up you usually don't have to wait as long to get them fixed as with the NVIDIA drivers, unless you are willing to hunt down and try out the umpteen bazillion beta drivers they leak out.

On the CPU/chipset side, things are a lot more stable on the AMD side compared to the early Athlon days -- I had to give up on my first Athlon motherboard (ASUS with KT133 chipset); I just couldn't get the thing to run stable. The Intel chipsets are still the standard in terms of reliability but the Athlon/Athlon 64 ones are very close.

[Ironwood]

All I'm going to add to this discussion is that Hard Drive drivers have a lot of sway on the speed thing.  If you use, for example, the MS certified drivers for the SATA raptor drives, it will run like ass.  Worse than slower drives.  You have to get the ones from WD themselves.  I noticed a significant boost to my rig by using these drives in a RAID.

Just sayin'

[Yegolev]

If I were you, and I certainly am not, I would get a 64-bit AMD setup.  It will kick every ounce of shit out of the top Intel setup, at least today.  Plus 64-bit Win will be here one day, and you will want to be on that bandwagon.

Regarding computer bottlenecks in general, few things are slower than the hard drive.  PC platform or otherwise, you do not want to hit paging, ever.  I currently run 1.5GB (3x512MB) of RAM and never utilize all of it.  Trust me here, the single biggest thing you can do to improve performance is to throw enough RAM at your rig so that you never get a page fault.  It doesn't matter what frequency your DIMMS run at if you get a page fault every few seconds.  Having said that, I'll mention that my area of expertise is not in Windows so I don't know how it decides to use the pagefile.  I do know that when I am using ~900MB of RAM that my pagefile utilization is ~16MB.

[Viin]

Speaking of 64bit chips, if you own the normal XP Professional version you can trade it in for the 64bit version that just shipped. See here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/upgrade/default.mspx

[Yegolev]

I'm going to wait and let this pie cook some more before I commit to being stuck in a NT4-ish driver hell.

[Sky]

And lo, the Lord spake unto Adam and said thusly, "Thou shalt not upgradeth thy OS before 'tis patchethed." And it was good.

[Bunk]

Bah! I remember running my machine on Win2k Release Candidate 2! So what if it crashed a lot and did weird shit, it was new! And shiny!

[Sky]

Last week we got in our copy of OSXS Tiger. Since kerberos is being a douche on my 10.3 test server, I figured I'd go a few rounds with the new kid.

Hangs on the very first screen of the installer, going to try a headless installation or something today.

Damn new OS releases. Anand is saying this is a buggy one, too. Whee. At least it was "free" (we bought the upgrade assurance thingy, figuring in 3 years we'd get at least two server OS upgrades which run $1k a pop, already paid for itself).

I'm also pissed at kerberos and the OSX implementation of LDAP, everything should be working fine, but kerberos refuses to authenticate via the GUI. I finally gave up and put it on the back burner.

Well, ran the installer while typing this, got to choose my installation language! Then it hung upon loading the next screen. This is "fun".

[Righ]

Bah! I remember running my machine on Win2k Release Candidate 2! So what if it crashed a lot and did weird shit, it was new! And shiny!

Are you still playing Shadowbane too?

[Pococurante]

All I'm going to add to this discussion is that Hard Drive drivers have a lot of sway on the speed thing.

And in general given the choice between putting load on solid state devices or instead on devices with lots of moving bits I go with the solid state.